I saw La La Land this weekend and Damien Chazelle musical is brilliant and emotional tribute to the 1950’s musical. Visually stunning eye candy for my inner graphic designer. Not so much a visual re-imaging of Los Angeles as a opportunity to see it through an artists eye. Chazelles last film, “Whiplash”used Jazz as a tool to explore ambition, the price of achieving excellence. Read More →
The lightsaber, an iconic design icon in the Star Wars franchise, represents a blend of technology, mythology, tradition, and innovation. Its sleek, minimalist design contrasts with its vivid energy blade, symbolizing the Jedi Order and the Force’s mystical power. The vibrant colors of the lightsaber’s blades carry symbolic weight, indicating character alignment and intent. The lightsaber’s legacy has inspired real-life innovations and reimagined various forms across media, showcasing the power of design in creating meaningful objects.Read More →
This amazing tee features the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, in grayscale, but with the lips and the roses in colours, creating a beautiful contrast. Inspired by Mexico’s popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class and race in Mexican society.Read More →
The arrangements of flowers offer far more than a pattern employing flowers and foliage neatly distributed in an appropriate container.
Not only is it a form of relaxation, but flower arrangement reawakens an awareness of nature upon which a philosophy – that of restraint and simplicity — is based.Read More →
One of my favourite pinup artists was Minnesota born Duane Bryers, creator of the famous Hilda, a pleasingly, popular and plump pinup girl. Bryers’ background was as interesting as his illustrations. Born in northern Michigan, he excelled at acrobatics as a child. His family moved to Virginia, Minnesota, at 12 and he soon had the neighbourhood gang putting on the “Jingling Brothers circus, complete with burlap-sack sidewalls.Read More →
Op art is a style of modern art that emerged in the 1960s, using optical effects to play with the viewer’s perception. It was led by Richard Anuszkiewicz, Bridget Riley, and Victor Vasarely, and had a significant impact on graphic and interior design. Interest in op art has decreased since its heyday, making it seem like a historical event.Read More →
Four architects—Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi—and two designers—Dario Bartolini and Lucia Bartolini—founded Archizoom this Italian avant-garde design studio in 1966 in Florence, Italy. They focused on exhibition installations and architecture and designing interiors and goods as part of the Italian Anti-Design or Radical Design movement.Read More →
The Painting of John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII, entitled the “Peace Sowers,” was done by Walter Molino (1915 – 1997). Molino shows the men moving hand-in-hand through a plowed field scattering “seeds of goodwill.” Molino’s placard underneath the painting reads;Read More →
Tachisme is frequently used interchangeably with art informel or Lyrical Abstraction to refer to the abstract art movement that flourished in Europe, particularly France, in the late 1940s and 1950s.Read More →
Cubism was one of the most important art styles in the West this century. It started when Picasso and BraqueRead More →
Kolman Moser was an Austrian, designer, metal worker and graphic designer. He was born in Vienna.
He designed for the Wiener Mode and in 1895 with other artists produced the Allegories set of folio volumes. It was during this time that he met Gustav Klimt.Read More →
Van Gogh is one of my favourite artists. The painting “Starry Night” is one of his most beloved. It is an authentic landscape and a projection of Van Gogh’s inner being. Vortexes of deep azure spin around stars and a crescent moon. A giant green, black cypress tree blows in the wind. Read More →
“The Innocent Eye Test” (1981) is perhaps the best-known work of Mark Tansey and one of his most successful. ItRead More →
The Rolodex is a desktop card file system. In the 1940s, Arnold Neustadter’s Company Zephyr American produced the Autodesk, a standard addressRead More →
OSAMU TEZUKA, who was revered as the “god of manga,” watched Bambi eighty times, until he had memorised every frame, and dreamed of equaling or surpassing Disney realism in his own animation.Read More →
As a designer, I am passionate about the history of art and their influence on ‘visual design.’ In art history, Dada is the artistic movement that preceded Surrealism, it began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 by a group of mostly painters and painters. Dada artworks challenged the preconceived notions of what art meant. Many Dadaists felt that the way to salvation was through political anarchy, the natural emotions, the intuitive and the irrational.Read More →
Morris believed his responsibility was “to revive a sense of beauty in home life, to restore the dignity of art to household decoration.Read More →
Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist that lived most of her life and physical pain, yet she continued to paint until her death, her artwork records her suffering and experiences as a woman. She was born to a Mexican mother and a German father.Read More →
Keith Haring was best known for his graffiti-like painting, initially on the black paper used to cover discontinued billboard advertisements in the New York subway. After after a feverish 1980’s style career of surging popular success and grudging critical attention, Haring died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 31.Read More →
Mare André was a french painter, decorator and furniture designer. He studied painting, at the Academie Julian, Paris. Read More →